This canyon, which is cut through the range of mountains known erroneously as the Cascades, is about forty miles long, if we count from Lytton and Yale. In its narrowest part, at Hell Gate, a child may throw a stone across; and its current is tremendous. So rapidly does it run, that no boat can venture upon it, and nothing but a salmon can stem its stream. It is full, too, of whirlpools; and at times the under rush is so strong that the surface appears stationary. What its depth may be it is impossible to tell. But one thing is certain, and that is, that in the cracks and crannies of its rocky bed must be gold in quantities beyond the dreams of a diseased avarice. But is this not all theory? No, it is not. At one part of the river, in the upper canyon, there is a place where the current stayed, and, with a long backward swirl, built up a bar. If you ask an old British Columbian about Boston Bar, he will, perhaps, tell stories which may seem to put Sacramento in the shade. Yet there will be much truth in them, for there was much gold found on that bar. Again, some years ago, at Black Canyon, on the South Fork of the Thompson, when that clear blue stream was at a low stage, there was a great landslip, which for some eighty minutes dammed back the waters into a lake. The whole country side gathered there with carts and buckets, scraping up the mud and gold from the bottom. Many thousands of dollars were taken out of the dry river bed before the dam gave way to the rising waters. And, if there was gold there, what is there even now in the great main sluice of the vastest natural gold mining concern ever set going, which has never yet since it began indulged in a "cleanup?"
I have been asked sometimes, when speaking about the Fraser and other rivers, which are undoubtedly gold traps, why it was that nobody attempted to turn them. Of course, my questioners were neither engineers nor geographers. Certainly an inspection of the map of British Columbia would show the utter impossibility of such a scheme. To dam the Fraser would be like turning the Amazon. Yet once I do not doubt that it was dammed, and that all the upper country was a vast lake, until the waters found the way through the Cascades which it has now cut into a canyon. Otherwise I cannot account for the vast benches and terraces which rise along the Thompson. Indeed, the whole of the Dry Belt down to Lytton has the appearance, to an eye only slightly cognisant of geological evidence, of an ancient lacustrine valley.